Second Mencken Chrestomathy

by H. L. Mencken

  The war upon modern science is quite as silly. Its sole effect must be to make every enlightened Catholic blush. And in the long run, if he be of a reflective habit, it must make him wonder whether he really belongs in the Roman camp. Every Catholic of that sort, the world being what it is, has a hard enough time already to hold his faith: it is opposed not only by a multitude of objective evidences but also by the inner spirit of his day and generation. Certainly it does not help him to be told that Belloc is a great historian and that Gibbon was an ass, that Kilmer was a good poet and Hardy a bad one, and that Windle was superior to Einstein. Nor does it help him to be taught solemnly that the hatching of rachitic and syphilitic children is an act of merit, ad maiorem Dei gloriam.

  Literary Theologians

  1

  G. K. Chesterton

  From the Smart Set, Feb., 1909, pp. 154–55.

  A review of ORTHODOXY, by G. K. Chesterton; New York, 1908

  Gilbert Chesterton’s “Orthodoxy,” which pretends to describe the author’s gradual conversion to Christianity, is the best argument for Christianity I have ever heard—and I have gone through, I suppose, fully a hundred. But after you lay it down you suddenly realize that Chesterton has been trying to prove, not only that Christianity is reasonable, but also that supernaturalism is truth. His argument, indeed, crossing the bounds of merely sectarian apologetics, passes on to the fundamental problem of philosophy: what is true? The materialists answer that anything man can prove is true. Chesterton answers that anything man can believe with comfort is true. Going further, he maintains that anything which gives disquiet is, ipso facto, false. Here we have pragmatism gone to seed, and here we have, too, a loud “No” to all human progress. As a matter of fact, the world gets ahead by losing its illusions, and not by fostering them. Nothing, perhaps, is more painful than disillusion, but all the same, nothing is more necessary. Because there were men willing to suffer painful doubts hundreds of years ago, we civilized white men of today were born without our ancestors’ harassing belief in witches. Because a horde of impious critics hang upon the flanks of our dearest beliefs today, our children, 500 years hence, will be free from our present firm faith in political panaceas, unlucky days, dreams, hunches, and the influence of mind over matter. Disillusion is like quinine. Its taste is abominable—but it cures. Not even Chesterton, with all his skill at writing, and with all his general cleverness—and he is the cleverest man, I believe, in the world today, though also one of the most ignorant—can turn that truth into anything else.

  2

  Leo Tolstoy

  From the Smart Set, May, 1920, pp. 142–43.

  A review of THE PATHWAY OF LIFE, by Leo Tolstoy; New York, 1920

  Leo Tolstoy’s “The Pathway of Life” is precisely the sort of book that one might imagine the great Russian chautauquan keeping by his bedside, to be resorted to for solace whenever nightmares awakened him and the sorrows of the world gnawed his liver. That is to say, it is a huge compendium of ethical and theological mush, partly of Tolstoy himself and partly by other sages. The ideas running through it are those of the average Methodist evangelist of the Iowa backwoods. The one and only duty of man is to please God; all other duties are illusory and of the devil. So far, so good. But how is one to determine what is pleasing to God? Here the venerable bosh-monger is far from clear, but one may at least guess at his general answer. Whatever is unpleasant to man is pleasant to God. The test is the natural instinct of man. If there arises within one’s dark recesses a hot desire to do this or that, then it is the paramount duty of a Christian to avoid doing this or that. And if, on the contrary, one cherishes an abhorrence of the business, then one must tackle it forthwith, all the time shouting “Hallelujah!” A simple enough religion, surely—simple, satisfying and idiotic. No wonder Tolstoy is the hero of Russian muzhiks and American Socialists.

  The old rat-trap had a bold spirit: he never tried to evade the necessary implications of his doctrine. For example, consider the matter of sex. Tolstoy believed and taught that passion was unqualifiedly evil—that it was a sin against the Holy Ghost to cast a friendly eye upon a pretty girl, or even upon one’s lawful wife. His disciples, poll-parroting this imbecile idea, quickly got into difficulties. What it inevitably led to was the advocacy of race suicide upon a colossal scale. No passion, no Stammhalter. But Tolstoy himself never bucked at this dilemma. Instead he boldly seized both horns, took a long breath, and emerged with the doctrine that the human race should be, must be, and of a right ought to be exterminated. Here I had better leave him. His notions begin to seduce me.…

  3

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  From the Smart Set, Aug., 1918, pp. 141–42.

  A review of THE NEW REVELATION, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; New York, 1918

  All that is yet known about life in Heaven is succinctly set forth here by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” “The Crime of the Congo,” “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” and other favorite fancies. It is not, however, fancy that he offers here, but, as he himself says, cold and indisputable fact. I have heard all the great ecclesiastics of the age upon the geography, government and social organization of Heaven, and they have unanimously left me unconvinced. All of them are too subjective; one feels that subconscious yearnings, in the Freudian manner, are corrupting their reports. Dr. Sunday describes the sort of Heaven that would undoubtedly please a senile baseball player, but leaves out all accommodation for the nobility and gentry. Dr. Henry Van Dyke simply pictures Princeton, N.J., during a Presbyterian Sängerfest. Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis shows us Brooklyn purged of Tammany, the Rum Demon, Socialism, Germans, atheism, automatic pianos and parturition. And the Fifth avenue rectors, taking one with another, get little beyond vague pictures of fashionable society, with overtones of quiet cocktails, Corona-Corona cigars and amorous intrigue. In these diligent projections of the unknown I find no comfort. Where is the waiter, Emil? Where is the chamber-music? Where is the fellow told off to shoot dogs, babies, Methodists, poets, owners of phonographs, issuers of dinner invitations, actors, hat-check girls, Bolsheviki? Where are the bouncers employed to keep out all women under seventy-five?

  Dr. Doyle, at his worst, is not guilty of any such self-centered forgetfulness. He doesn’t conjure up a Heaven to his own taste, forgetting my taste and your taste; he confines himself to the few details that are positively known. These come, not out of his private fancy, but from the reports of persons already in celestial residence—in brief, from Raymond, Little Brighteyes, Wahwah the Indian chief, and all the other tried and true communicants. All he does is to collate and summarize their reports, introducing nothing of his own invention. The facts that emerge are quite simple. At the moment of death a man “finds himself in a spirit body,” which is the exact counterpart of his old one, save that all disease, weakness, or deformity has passed from it. If he has been devoured by a wolf, he is nevertheless sound and undigested. If he has died of drink, there is no Katzenjammer. This restored body “is standing or floating beside the old body.” The dead man, for the moment, is not clearly aware that he is dead. Seeing the nurse still in the room, powdering her nose against the arrival of the undertaker, he attempts to speak to her. But in vain; she can’t hear him. Then he suddenly notices that there are others present, dead like himself. With these conversation is easier. Some step up and shake hands with him. Others kiss him. Finally, “some more radiant being,” apparently a guide for newcomers, takes him in charge and proceeds to show him the sights.

  Before getting very far, however, the candidate begins to feel drowsy, and presently he falls asleep. This sleep is long and profound; it may “extend for weeks or months.” Then for his day in court, and a rigid examination into his doings on earth. The details of celestial jurisprudence and penology are as yet somewhat uncertain, for those who have been through the mill are naturally rather reticent about telling of their punishment, but Dr. Doyle assures us that a belief in Purgatory “is justifi
ed by the reports from the other side.” These same reports fix many other details of life there. The inhabitants, it appears, live in communities, like seeking like. No eating is done, but the arts are practised, including music. “Married couples do not necessarily reunite,” but genuine love affairs are resumed, though “there is no sexuality in the grosser sense and no child-birth.” The young gradually grow older and the old gradually grow younger, until all are about the same age. No one has any work to do. Clothes are still worn, “as one would expect, since there is no reason why modesty should disappear.” Finally, everyone is “intensely happy.”

  I commend this clear and trustworthy description of life in Heaven to all who have been dismayed and disappointed by sacerdotal wind-music. Dr. Doyle has nothing to sell, nor is he trying to scare anyone into subscribing to any definite scheme of theology. All he pretends to do is to set down in a simplified form what has been communicated to gifted mediums by the more talkative folks beyond the rainbow. He is not a prophet, but merely a reporter. I believe that his little book will rid your mind of the doubts and horrors which now infest it, as it has rid mine.

  The Believing Mind

  From the American Mercury, June, 1932, pp. 251–52.

  A review of HOUDINI AND CONAN DOYLE, by Bernard M. L. Ernst and Hereward Carrington; New York, 1932

  Mr. Ernst is president of the parent assembly of the Society of American Magicians, and presumably represents Houdini in the combat here reported; Mr. Carrington, who is a well-known writer on table-tapping, slate-writing, thought-reading and other such ghostly marvels, is apparently in Doyle’s corner. Just what hand each of them had in the book I do not know, but to me at least it seems to lean toward the transcendental side, despite a somewhat elaborate show of impartiality. Doyle, who was an indefatigable spook-chaser, gets nearly all the breaks. Even when his bovine credulity is exposed in the most patent and painful manner, and on evidence supplied fatuously by himself, he is yet represented to have been a sagacious and even scientific fellow, with no appetite save for the truth. By the same token poor Houdini is patronized rather heavily, and his weaknesses—for example, his vanity—surely get sufficient notice. Nevertheless, it is plain from the chronicle that he had all the better of Doyle, and that there can scarcely be two opinions as to which was the more intelligent.

  The relation between the men was a curious one, and it is worth something to have this record of it. They began exchanging letters in 1920, and during the four years following met many times. Doyle, in those days, was busily whooping up spiritualism, and it was his obvious hope to convert Houdini, whose celebrity as a stage magician would have made his conversion a notable victory for the holy cause. But Houdini, though he was always willing and even eager to examine Doyle’s “evidence,” was never so much as flustered by it. Every time he came to close quarters with it he found that it was full of holes. Most of the tricks of Doyle’s mediums he could do himself, and far better than they could; as for the remainder he saw every reason to believe that they would yield in the same way to a more careful approach. Doyle bombarded him with challenges and persuasions, but he never came into camp. When he died in 1926 he was fully convinced that spiritualism was buncombe. Few men ever had a better opportunity to judge it, or as much competence.

  Though, as I have said, Doyle is treated very politely in this book, the fact that he was an almost fabulous ass cannot be concealed. It may sound incredible, but it is a simple fact that he passed to his brummagem Other World in 1930 thoroughly convinced that Houdini himself had been a medium. Houdini, while they were both alive, protested against this nonsense with great earnestness, and offered the most solemn assurance that all of his tricks—getting out of handcuffs, reading minds, staying under water for long periods, and so on—were tricks and nothing more, but Doyle kept on insisting idiotically that some “psychic” power was involved in them. I commend the fact to connoisseurs of human imbecility. It is, in its way, a superb measure of the intellectual dignity of the whole psychical research movement. Doyle was undoubtedly one of its great stars, and maybe it would not be too much to say that he was the greatest of them, yet he continued to believe that Houdini was infested by spooks in the face of the most direct and unanswerable evidence to the contrary. No wonder it was easy for professional mediums to fetch him. And no wonder he seemed a master mind to the dolts who sit trembling in dingy back parlors.

  Once, at Atlantic City, he undertook to get a message from Houdini’s dead mother, with Lady Doyle as the medium. The message turned out to be the usual maudlin stuff—“Oh, my darling, thank God, thank God, at last I’m through!… Why, of course, I want to talk to my boy—my own beloved boy,” and so on. Houdini was polite, but it must have been hard for him to contain himself, for the whole message was in the ornate spiritualist dialect of English—and his mother, a Hungarian rabbi’s widow, had only the most imperfect knowledge of the language, and never used it in speaking to him. When the seance was over he made some idle scratches on a sheet of paper, and presently wrote the name Powell. Thus Doyle described the episode in “Our American Adventure,” printed a bit later on:

  Now, Dr. Ellis Powell, my first fighting partner in spiritualism, had just died in England—worn out, I expect [sic], by his own exertions, for he was a desperately hard worker in the cause. I was the man he was most likely to signal to, and here was his name coming through the hand of Houdini. “Truly, Saul is among the prophets,” said I.

  In brief, another “proof” that Houdini was a medium—and didn’t know it. Unfortunately, Houdini himself also left a record of that sitting, and from it we learn that the Powell whose name occurred to him was not Dr. Ellis Powell at all, but one F. E. Powell, a fellow magician, at that moment stranded in Texas. Later on, Doyle protested against this and similar exposures of his fantastic credulity on the ground that he regarded spiritualism as a religion, and that his opponents ought to respect it as such.

  The Road of Doubt

  From DAMN! A BOOK OF CALUMNY, 1918, p. 87

  The first effect of what used to be called natural philosophy is to fill its devotee with wonder at the marvels of God. This explains why the pursuit of science, so long as it remains superficial, is not incompatible with the most naïve sort of religious faith. But the moment the student of the sciences passes this stage of childlike amazement and begins to investigate the inner workings of natural phenomena, he sees how ineptly many of them are managed, and so he tends to pass from awe of the Creator to criticism of the Creator, and once he has crossed that bridge he has ceased to be a believer. One finds plenty of country doctors, amateur botanists, high-school physics teachers and other such quasi-scientists in the pews on Sunday, but one never sees a Huxley there, or a Darwin, or an Ehrlich.

  Veritas Odium Parit

  From PREJUDICES: FOURTH SERIES, 1924, pp. 198–99.

  First published in the American Mercury, Jan., 1924, p. 78

  Another old delusion is that one to the effect that truth has a mysterious medicinal power—that it makes the world better and man happier. The fact is that truth, in general, is extremely uncomfortable, and that the masses of men are thus wise to hold it in suspicion. The most rational religious ideas held in modern times are probably those of the Unitarians; the most nonsensical are those of the Christian Scientists. Yet it must be obvious to every observer that the average Unitarian, even when he is quite healthy, is a sour and discontented fellow, whereas the average Christian Scientist, even when he is down with gallstones, is full of an enviable peace. I have known, in my time, several eminent philosophers. The happiest of them, in his moments of greatest joy, used to entertain himself by drawing up wills leaving his body to a medical college.

  VII. BRETHREN OF THE CLOTH

  Playing with Fire

  From the Baltimore Evening Sun, Dec. 17, 1927

  THE TRUTH is that life without combat would be unbearable, and that men function freest and most gloriously under stress. Every effort to make humanity peaceable has f
ailed, and I believe that all the efforts to come will fail. The colossal failure of Christianity must have been noticed, by this time, even by the clergy, a singularly naïve and deluded body of men. It came into the world to make an end of war; it has made more wars than avarice, or even than hunger. To this day, it is difficult for a Christian clergyman to arise in his pulpit without excoriating something, if that something be only war.

  I surely do not complain of the fact, for on the whole the brethren of the cloth have contributed more to my mild and phosphorescent happiness in this life than any other class of men. There was a time when I had almost constant differences with them, and learnt to have a high respect for their dialectic talents. What makes them so formidable is their familiarity with weapons of a dreadful potency. They handle hell-fire as freely and easily as a barber handles his shears: it is their everyday arm. No other men are so formidably equipped. The most a lawyer ever demands of the victim before him is that he be hanged, but even the meekest clergyman is constantly proposing to doom his opponents to endless tortures in lakes of boiling brimstone.

  This habit of playing daily with horrible weapons makes clergymen extraordinarily violent in controversy, and violence is what makes that great art charming. I can recall being tackled by them for trivial errors in political science—if, indeed, they were errors at all—in a manner almost suitable for flooring the appalling beasts described in the Book of Revelation. Once, when I argued that chasing poor harlots up and down the alleys of Baltimore would not make the town chaste, some of them accused me of having a proprietary interest in bawdy-houses. Another time, when I argued more or less calmly that Prohibition could never be enforced, they alleged that I was in the pay of the Whiskey Trust, and pledged to besot and ruin the youth of the Republic.